How codeless enterprise paas installs agility to business it

www.encanvas.com

HOW CODELESS ENTERPRISE PAAS

TECHNOLOGY BRINGS AGILITY TO

BUSINESS IT

NICK LAWRIE

SEPTEMBER 2015

WHITE PAPER

2 © 2015 Encanvas Ltd

WHITE PAPER | How Codeless Enterprise PaaS Technology brings Agility to Business IT



Contents

1. Introduction ....................................................................................... 5

A New Economic Imperative ..................................................................... 5

The ‘IT’ Bottom Line .................................................................................. 5

The Emerging Need For Rubber-Walled IT ................................................ 6

Serving the Long-Tail ................................................................................. 7

2. Exploring Codeless Enterprise PaaS Technology .................................. 9

Origins of Situational Applications ............................................................ 9

Norms of Behaviour in Software Delivery ............................................... 10

A New Organizational Design .................................................................. 11

The Evolution of Something Better That Works… ................................... 11

3. The Contributions Codeless PaaS Makes To Enterprise IT ................... 12

4. The Impact of Change on Programming ............................................. 18

5. Conclusion ........................................................................................ 19

About the Author ..................................................................................... 20

About NDMC Ltd ...................................................................................... 20



CODELESS ENTERPRISE Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a genre of

enterprise software formed from innovations in web-server-centric

cloud computing that installs a near-real-time method of authoring

business software applications that can then be managed at a fraction

of the cost of traditional enterprise software. It differs from previous

systems and methods -- such as Rapid Applications Development

(RAD) and Agile – as it morphs the roles of project manager, business

analyst and developer into a single competency. This is made possible

by innovative apps design and operational management tooling that

de-skills the life-cycle of applications development.

Use of Codeless Enterprise PaaS technology embeds IT transformation

into the change process and subsumes the role of programming in the

development of business applications in support of organizational

process change.

This white paper considers the impact of Codeless Enterprise PaaS

technology on the world of business IT and the discipline of software

applications development.



1. Introduction

A New Economic Imperative

For decades, well established large organizations with robust business

models have enjoyed IT budgets of relative plenty but a slow-down in

economic growth in recent years has installed a new economic reality.

The role of IT in organizations has not changed fundamentally – even

while operating in a depressed economic period organizations need

information systems to fuel process improvements, creative

innovation, growth and front-line customer services. What HAS

changed fundamentally is the size of IT budgets, probably forever. The

world of corporate IT is facing a permanent change in its funding –

and much of that investment (over 60%) goes into ‘keeping the lights

on’ IT investments.

To achieve significant cost reductions whilst avoiding direct impact on

front-line services and growth, organizations are re-visiting how they

run IT and procure services. Decision makers are pressured to inject

innovation into procurement approaches and to take marginally more

risk where the promise of step-change rewards exists.

Nowhere is the potential for rewards greater or more achievable than

in the supply of business software applications that satisfy stakeholder

demands to source innovation in information systems, improve the

efficiency of processes and inject new ways of engaging with

customers and finding new markets.

The ‘IT’ Bottom Line

According to management consulting practitioners, the total cost of

IT for organizations should not exceed 1% of income. For many

organizations, a target outline cost for IT in the order of 0.5% is

achievable.

Organizations that have already thoughtfully engineered their IT

function, like easyjet in the United Kingdom, can today run their IT

operations at a cost that represents less than 1% of total revenues.

This compares to the majority of organizations whose IT costs will

range from 1.5% to 6% of income.

The potential of IT to create competitive advantage, boost customer

service performance and streamline business processes to create



operational excellence has taken a knock over the last two decades –

but the potential still exists for IT to do just that.

The Emerging Need For Rubber-Walled IT

Like any eco-system, organizations operate within a context of their

environment – their market-place, their locality, the people that serve

them, suppliers that provide raw materials and services, customers

that buy from them. These external factors shape the way

organizations behave. But there are also internal factors that influence

behaviors and how decisions are made such as culture, norms of

operating behaviour, and perceptions of what good practice is and

should be.

The 20th century was about industry and mechanization. The

vision of most business leaders was to achieve economies through a

blend of productivity enablement and mechanization, to become lean

and mean; to be excellent at those internal processes that would drive

production, market share and ultimately shareholder value. And most

of these organizations, if not all, operated a command and control

management structure that meant the educated few directed the

uneducated masses.

Humans in this picture of a perfect organization were little more than

drones that were to be owned, told what to do and then paid a salary

for their labours.

The 21st century is about agility. Improved telecommunications,

travel methods, computing and the Internet have all contributed to

the globalization of markets. Seemingly every product or service is

within reach ‘at the speed of light’ as Bill gates, founder of Microsoft®

put it. The state of competition has changed with some regions of the

world enjoying advantages in lower cost labour supply, while others

benefit from western world brand leadership. The balance of power

rests on adaptability and the recognition that markets are changing

their shape and structure. The Darwinist mantra of ‘survival of the

fittest’ has morphed into ‘survival of the most adaptable; the fastest to

market; the organization most able to respond quickly to new and

emerging customer wants. Traditional Michael Porter-esque

marketing strategy concepts of ‘winning market share’ in static

markets have been corrupted by a paucity of examples of markets

converging, deforming, transforming - and with new competitors,

those able to leverage their privileged assets and operational



capabilities, emerging from different industries; seemingly appearing

from nowhere.

Mechanization has run its course with most organizations are

reasonably efficient at managing their internal processes; generally

using the same tools and similar methods to achieve their outcomes.

Competitive advantage is more about adapting to market

opportunities and change FASTER than competitors than it is about

sharpening pencils and cutting resources that support processes

down to the bone.

To survive and secure growth in this harsh trading environment,

organizations require adaptive capabilities – rubber-walled buildings

that can scale as a business grows, populated by a rubber-walled

talent pool, equipped with rubber-walled IT.

Serving the Long-Tail

The majority of large enterprise have by now adopted core platforms

for business computing to service the ‘majority need’ for software

applications. But a faster pace of change in business markets, the need

for greater compliance and control, greater access to data made

possible by ‘big data’ technologies and the joint impacts of social

networking, consumerism and mobile working have led to greater

demands by individuals and communities of users for ‘enterprise-

grade’ software applications to meet their ever changing information

needs.

In most large enterprises, the majority need for applications is met by

a small number (i.e. the top 20%) of enterprise applications. Sourcing

and deploying these ‘big wheels’ of enterprise computing architecture

- that underpin the core mission-critical processes of the enterprise -

has been the focus of enterprise computing for decades. Economies

from these deployments come from the adoption of best practice and



the consolidation of business operations to shared service centers able

to fulfil business needs across the enterprise.

The last decade however has seen an ever growing demand for

additional applications to respond to the ever changing needs of

individuals and communities. While the net number of users for these

applications may be lower, the importance of the information, and the

role of these individuals as innovators and change agents in the

enterprise, has placed greater pressure on IT and procurement

departments to source an ever increasing range of business

applications. This demand by smaller numbers of users for higher

numbers of applications has become known as the ‘Long-Tail’. In a

period when businesses are trying to cut purchase and support costs

for IT by reducing numbers of applications, these demands are

particularly unhelpful.

Situational applications platforms meet this need by providing a

common technology platform able to repeatedly author applications

and deliver them to individuals or communities of users in a fraction

of the time and at a fraction of the cost of traditional tools. This is

made possible by their adoption of codeless authoring and use of

ready-to-use templates and design building blocks that negate use of

traditional best-of-breed platform tools and coding skills.

The first ever situational application platform was the spreadsheet.

Times are changing. Information workers need to deal with much

bigger data sets and IT leaders must ensure that data is organized,

always-secure and any software application must adhere to necessary

standards of governance and compliance. The new generation of

codeless enterprise PaaS technology is engineered to meet ‘IT hygiene

standards’ of security, performance and scalability, yet they provide

unrivalled self-service tooling to enable web workers to exploit

existing systems data.

The ‘long-tail’ of demand for situational apps

http://blogs.idc.com/ie/wp-content/LongTail_01.jpg



2. Exploring Codeless Enterprise PaaS Technology

Origins of Situational Applications

Codeless Enterprise PaaS technology has emerged in response to

growing demands from business users that work in social groups that

span across enterprise boundaries and expect to be able to author

applications for their communities in a form purposely sculptured to

the needs of the community of use.

The idea of socially-centric, built for purpose and potentially thrown

away software was unknowingly endorsed by technology thought-

leader Clay Shirky in his essay ‘Situated Software’ published in March

2004 when he wrote, “Part of the future I believe I'm seeing is a change

in the software ecosystem which, for the moment, I'm calling situated

software. This is software designed in and for a particular social

situation or context. This way of making software is in contrast with

what I'll call the Web School (the paradigm I learned to program in),

where scalability, generality, and completeness were the key virtues.”

In August 2007, Luba Cherbakov and a team from IBM wrote the first

of two articles on what they described as ‘Situational Applications’. In

their paper titled ‘SOA meets situational applications, Part 1: Changing

computing in the enterprise’, Cherbakov and her colleagues defined

the attributes of Situational Applications, stating, “The loosely

accepted term situational applications describe applications built to

address a particular situation, problem, or challenge. The development

life cycle of these types of applications is quite different from the

traditional IT-developed, SOA-based solution. SAs are usually built by

casual programmers using short, iterative development life cycles that

often are measured in days or weeks, not months or years. As the

requirements of a small team using the application change, the SA

often continues to evolve to accommodate these changes. Significant

changes in requirements may lead to an abandonment of the used

application altogether; in some cases it's just easier to develop a new

one than to update the one in use.

The idea of end-user computing in the enterprise is not new.

Development of applications by amateur programmers using IBM

Lotus® Notes®, Microsoft® Excel spreadsheets in conjunction with

Microsoft Access, or other tools is widespread. What's new in this mix

is the impressive growth of community-based computing coupled

with an overall increase in computer skills, the introduction of new

technologies, and an increased need for business agility.



Norms of Behaviour in Software Delivery

The traditional view of applications development has been formed

around the concept of mechanization: creating software applications

that automate and formalize internal processes that rarely change in

support of a business model and strategy that rarely changes. In a

new era of market agility, leaders need and expect their IT to become

just as adaptable as their organization needs to be.

One of the inhibitors to change is the fact that the majority of people

engaged in the authoring of software applications today are

programmers and yet the activity of programming – its consequential

impact on the time, cost and complexity of authoring new applications

- is itself a barrier to innovation.

A significant challenge of the change facing the IT industry is that the

people that need to shape IT also need to be the same people that are

close to the process – and those traditional skills that were once

cherished will by necessity take a back-seat to a deeper understanding

of business needs and processes.

The norms of behaviour and attitudes that pervade in departments

responsible for delivering effective information systems have evolved

over decades and are unlikely to change within moments. It is taken

as a given that it is less risky to purchase ready-to-use software

applications rather than build them; that larger software companies

make better software than smaller ones; that no software tooling

could possibly have the dexterity to meet broad needs and remove

the need for programming. To a large extent it serves the stakeholders

of the IT industry – the large software companies, IT leaders and skilled

IT professionals – to maintain this false status quo and avoid risk of

change. But this status quo does not meet the needs of organizations

facing bourgeoning IT costs and a slow pace of change – or knowledge

workers whose business software tools fall short of their direct needs

(and often poorer in quality than the applications Users enjoy on their

mobile phone!).

In order for norms of behaviour to change there has to be evidence of

‘something better that works’.



A New Organizational Design

It’s unrealistic to expect change to happen in organizations

‘organically’ when departmental structures encourage the status quo

to pervade by operating budgets and incentives plans shaped around

the reality of business behaviour as it works today.

For this reason, some organizations are today creating improvement

teams – so-called ‘organization departments’ – that unite a blend of

capabilities needed to affect and embed change into organizational

culture. These departments blend skills including performance

management, organizational design, compliance management,

human resources management, project management, business

analysis and information systems management.

New tooling is needed to equip these hybrid change teams with the

means to shape technology as they shape processes. Organizations

that have adopted this ‘internal change agency’ concept like

Volkswagen Group are achieving a substantially faster pace of growth

compared to industry peers.

The Evolution of Something Better That Works…

Codeless Enterprise PaaS technology platforms have emerged in the

last decade to facilitate the authoring of web server delivered business

applications on-demand in support of process improvement. This

technology promises to arm organizations with rubber-walled IT that

can grow and shrink according to need without traditional frictional

costs of change. It removes much of the programming overhead

associated with custom applications development and the

requirement for many specialist tools needed to author business

applications. Whilst Codeless Enterprise PaaS technology changes the

method of design, delivery and operational maintenance of IT, it does



not fundamentally manifest changes in the operating environment:

the applications it produces use the Microsoft® Web Platform and

standard web browsers as their conduit to Users. Case studies suggest

that the outcome of using Codeless Enterprise PaaS technology is to

cut applications time-to-market by at least a factor of ten and it

produces applications and websites that can be as much as ten times

cheaper to run.

3. The Contributions Codeless PaaS Makes To Enterprise IT

Advantages of Codeless Operation over Programming

Prior to Codeless Enterprise PaaS technologies coming of age, the

investors and stakeholders of new applications were consigned to a

distant advisory role: often seeing their new applications for the first

time as a fait accompli when presented by project teams post-

development. The consequences of this ‘back-room’ programming

approach are well evidenced by the huge number of examples of

failed IT projects over the last decade and beyond. Even when agile

development team structures are employed, the issue of interpreting

correctly the ‘best guess’ of what stakeholders feel they need in an

application remains. All too often, the ‘best-guess’ of development

teams soaks up all of the budget for a new applications development

leaving stakeholders to make-do with the outcome because the

money runs out before re-working can be completed.

Codeless Enterprise PaaS technologies makes it possible for

organizations to embed IT adaptation into their change programmes,

equipping business analysts with easier to master applications design



and deployment tools; equipping them to author applications on-

demand in a workshop environment.

The iterative workshop design methods can prove to be more effective

than programmatic development methods because designers can act

on stakeholder feedback as it arrives without incurring high re-

working costs. Each aspect of the applications design – from UI look-

and-feel to applications data models and logic – can be iterated with

the same tool as part of the same correction without having to involve

a team of developers. This can result in applications that reach their

market up to ten-times faster than when programmed.

De-skilling the authoring task to the power of 1

The expertise needed to author business applications is so diverse that

few IT professionals could hope to equip themselves with all of this

know-how were they using traditional tools and programmatic

methods of authoring. There are, after-all so many IT disciplines to

master when authoring an application - content management, search,

geo-mapping, database design, business intelligence and analytics to

name just a few. Add to this the additional complexity that many of

these technology disciplines are served by expert tools, each with their

own approaches and integration tooling, and it’s clear why so many IT

projects have demanded teams of developers. With codeless design

software, one business analyst can design and deliver enterprise

applications with a single tool-kit without need of expert tools or skills.

This not only reduces the number of ‘applications authoring heads’

around the workshop table to one, it also means the project

management process is far less complex because ideas, opinions and

concepts don’t need to be acquired and put down on to paper, then

transferred to a team of programmers working with a virtual blind-

fold in a back-office somewhere.

Speed of authoring

Traditional programming takes a very long time to complete. Even

with the advent of object based programming, the programming of

new applications is measured in weeks and months. To have a group

of people in a workshop ‘waiting for programmers to author code’

would simply not work when developments take so long. Codeless

Enterprise PaaS technology enables business analysts to pre-author

basic applications prototypes including forms, data structures, user



permissions structures and logic (etc.) prior to workshops with

stakeholders because it’s possible to iterate on-demand. A case book

application is used to acquire the base requirements of the application

to form the basis of the prototype. This means not all design work

needs to occur within a workshop.

Access to existing data required for re-use

The majority of information that business people use exists within

back-office systems – thought to be in the order of 60% of content -

and increasingly on the web (via web services and other formats like

RSS and twitter). Codeless Enterprise PaaS technologies like includes

tooling to acquire data from disparate sources, and in varied file

formats, and makes information re-usable through its data mashup

capabilities that include information workflow management, extract,

transform and load capabilities, data connectors for most data silos

and a data dictionary to assign friendly names to data. Codeless

Enterprise PaaS technology provides capabilities to also design new

data marts and structures including virtual views of data held in

Microsoft® SQL Server™ databases.

Lack of Stakeholder familiarity in programming and data

modelling

Most application users and investors are not familiar with how

databases work or what programming code produces. When they see

screens littered with script they feel disenfranchised and are likely to

want to ‘leave the IT to the IT people’ which immediately creates a

barrier to innovation.

Ability to achieve delivery of applications through workshops by

providing the critical-mass of application features

Codeless Enterprise PaaS technology presents a critical-mass of

components necessary for building the diversity of applications

organizations demand to run their processes; to manage and analyse

their data within the workshop context, When business analysts are

required to repeatedly resort to programming, or the integration of

third party tools, they are effectively prevented from adopting the

collegiate workshop style project model. Codeless Enterprise PaaS

technology provides a complete tool-kit with integral design elements

fulfilling most common design requirements including:



Data entry forms supporting all popular form field formats

including long-txt, short-text, formatted field, Date, Numeric,

Images etc.

Panels and conditional panels for managing groups of on-

screen items and building logic between panels for purposes of

presentation and control

Document and content management

Dashboard meters

2D and 3D reporting

Search and discovery

Data analytics with data tables and on-screen graphical

presentation – including interactive spreadsheet style data

views

Social networking and URL sharing features

Geo-spatial intelligence and data visualization

Rich-text and text pop-up

Directory services integration

Email, video, twitter and social networking integration

HTML/JavaScript and C# programmable frames

Upload and download controls

It is unlikely that an application unable to offer such a rich level of

functionality would succeed in giving business analysts the tools they

need to achieve outcomes in a workshop environment.

Facilitating an iterative applications development process

No application is ever truly right-first-time. Developments follow a

path of trial and error, with acknowledgement that new features and

tools will suggest to stakeholders smarter ways of working that may

not have been in the original vision of the application. As applications

develop corrections are inevitable. The point-and-click nature of the

design environment and its control over all applications attributes

(data source design and integration, user interface, logic, design

element properties etc.) mean that wholesale changes can be instantly

performed without having to incur large re-working overheads.



Speed of deployment (transitioning from initial design to live

application)

Sometimes, applications delivery is halted while software

infrastructure is installed or a pilot system is deployed on a live server

environment. This can require new data structures to be created or

new User Permissions structures to be formed. The web portal

administration cockpit these obstacles by parameterizing all of the

Web Server settings without requiring secondary processes to

‘organize’ the operational server environment.

Reduced de-bugging, reduced time to resolution of bugs

When applications are authored using pre-designed design elements

the number of ‘bugs’ in deployed applications are reduced. When

design elements are pre-coded and configured through parameters,

the nature of bugs is not one of ‘poor programming’ but will have

more to do with the way an application has been deployed, how it

‘joins’ components, sources data, manages data integrity and applies

logic. While each of these classes of software bug still can result in an

unsatisfactory User experience, the nature of the bug is more easily

identified and resolutions are easier to find through the simple English

descriptions of error logs produced codeless PaaS tooling.

Removal of testing and tuning procedures

Codeless Enterprise PaaS technologies are supplied with building

blocks that are pre-tested for browser compatibility and pre-

optimized for browser delivery. This means applications developed

using native tools are ready to be deployed without additional testing

or tuning. This dramatically reduces time-to-market and the

traditional project overheads attached to delivering new applications.

Reducing training/ documentation overheads through Rich-

Internet Features

Applications developed using Rich Internet tools offer greater

versatility in the way pages are composed and presented to Users.

Embracing AJAX technology means that highly personalised data

views can be built on-the-fly for Users based on their preferences and

User Group associations. Codeless Enterprise PaaS technologies use

Rich Internet capabilities that produce attractive user interfaces and a



responsive user experience. It provides a very rich, friendly and visual

User experience that dramatically reduces the need for help and

documentation by providing applications that are intuitive and

employ tools like wizards to guide Users through more complex

processes.

The illustration below examples the business impact of adopting

Codeless Enterprise PaaS technologies.



4. The Impact of Change on Programming

The purpose of codeless enterprise PaaS technology is to create

business applications that serve the long-tail of demand for

applications that exists within business organizations; largely driven by

demands for process change and the forever changing needs of

knowledge workers. The overwhelming majority of these use cases call

for database-centric and analytical applications that gather, manage,

share and report on aspects of process or business. The nature of

business today requires these applications to be accessible from

anywhere including mobile web browsers, tablets and PCs.

To serve this need, some codeless enterprise PaaS technologies inherit

structures similar in concept to Lego® bricks. Pre-formed design

elements adopt common parameters and interlocking mechanisms so

they can be constructed in many millions of ways and yet they still

don’t require programming. Given that business applications tend to

follow a common form, the use of this augmented tool-kit removes

time, risk and complexity from the authoring process.

The more sophisticated and predictable methods-based authoring

process that codeless PaaS platforms provide, enable traditionally

arduous and time consuming repetitive programming tasks to be

identified and progressively automated. It means that aspects of

applications hygiene such as security management, tuning and testing

(particularly browser testing which has more lately become a huge

burden on development teams) can be pre-baked into the application

platform, negating the need for individual deployments to undergo

such an extreme testing and tuning cycle.

While programming will always have its place in the creation of expert

systems, the use of programming skills and tools to author

applications that are variations on a theme is a poor use of resources

and only serves to add unnecessary complexity and risk to process

improvement initiatives.



5. Conclusion

There is a level of inevitability about change; particularly when the

rewards of change are so significant to the organizations that seek

competitive advantage from their IT investments.

From our experiences we can draw the following conclusions, that:

1. The need to operate more effective and more adaptive

information systems at lower cost will continue to drive

commercial enterprises relentlessly towards new applications

authoring techniques and tools that will improve the quality of

software, increase the likelihood of software development

project success while reducing transitional costs. These

techniques will inevitably reduce or ultimately remove the role

of software programming for those areas of the discipline that

are repetitive in their nature, or in their outcome.

2. Codeless Enterprise PaaS technology has by now achieved a

critical-mass of technical capabilities and an enviable track-

record of successes that evidences, arguably for the first time,

that it is possible to create a tool-kit with suitable dexterity and

operational attributes to enable an agile workshop authoring

process.

3. Once the rewards of this step-change in software delivery

performance become more known and better measured, the

pace of Enterprise PaaS adoption in the IT industry is likely to

step up several gears – and those professionals with a deeper

appreciation of the methods and tools in play are likely to find

their skills in high demand.



Contact information

About the Author

Previously European Financial Director for a Fortune 500

pharmaceuticals company, in 2002 Nick Lawrie co-founded the

Management Consultancy NDMC Ltd whose portfolio of clients

includes some of the world’s largest public and private sector

organisations.

With Ian Tomlin he co-authored ‘Agilization’, a guide to regenerating

competitiveness for Western World companies. Nick has also

contributed to other business books authored by Ian Tomlin including

‘Cloud Coffee House’, a guide to the impact of cloud social networking

on business and ‘Social Operating Systems’, an exploration into the

next generation of enterprise computing platform.

About Encanvas

At Encanvas we give our customers the ability to author limitless

numbers of situational applications to turn data into a weapon for

Marketing Analytics, Sales Analytics, Operational Analytics and

Financial Analytics. Encanvas Secure&Live™ is a codeless enterprise

Platform as a Service (PaaS) system. It harvests data, installs

operational analytics to learn from it and then supplies the tooling

needed to build situational applications (without coding) to act on

what matters.

Encanvas Inc.

(Americas) +1 201 777 3398

(Europe) +44 1865 596151

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